"And We Have Walked Ten Thousand Miles... er... Posts"

And so, here we are, at the official #10,000 on the blog post meter, reached in barely more than three years (and probably reached back in December, based on how many posts Blogger can eat on a hungry day).

Let me suggest to each of you a plan:

Practice random acts:

• of leadership
• of questioning authority
• of speaking up and out and over the top of those who would silence you
• of refusing to believe when someone tells you that you cannot do something
• of holding your elected representatives responsible for their votes that are not just against your best interests but the best interests of the globe
• of holding yourself accountable
• of demanding more and NOT accepting less
• of patriotism since American patriotism was NEVER (before Bush arrived) about sitting back, shutting up, and taking it like a peon

And, should you decide you happen to like the results you get (and trust me, I say from experience that you won't always), then practice one or more or ALL of these acts without randomness.

These were the tenets I made myself agree to when I decided to start this blog right after Christmas 2003, recovering from a serious illness that really should have killed me, and when I decided that, since I remained alive, I had to stop being such a scaredy cat.

Yes, I have suffered for my outspokenness. But - as much as I sometimes wish I could turn back the clock and NOT take this path - this is what I feel I must do for myself, my family, my community, my country, and my world. And, somehow, here I still am. Bruised but not exactly broken.

Good luck, my friends. It's worth it.

Well, At Least George S. Will Is Back to Normal

It was getting scary there for awhile as George S. "Red Power Tie" Will made so much sense I occasionally (perhaps as many as three times) quoted him in agreement with something this wingnutter wrote in a column I still don't understand how he rates.

But with last week's column suggesting that "who's to say global warming is bad because who's to say the world should be a "certain" temperature?", and this column saying Democrats who criticize the president lack courage (yes, Bush and Cheney ordering unending war from the sanctity of the White House while the French pastry chef serves them eclairs and Condi Rice pronounces them "brilliant!" takes serious balls), it's nice to know the rest of us can return to ignoring Will.

Hmmm... where was Will during Vietnam? Roosting with the other chickenhawks? Oh wait, there was that married woman he lived in sin with forever before the Right embarrassed him enough to marry her or something like that.

That takes courage, I suppose.